Mr. Gionfriddo testified that two-thirds of individuals screened on
MHA's website screen positively for mental illness. If true, this is an
alarming percentage, and is less indicative of a mental illness epidemic
than it is of the inaccuracy of screening tools used to diagnosis mental
illness. Referring to the latest version of psychiatry's Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, National Institute of Mental
Health Director Thomas Insel, M.D. wrote, "The weakness is its lack of
validity... Patients with mental disorders deserve better... That is why
NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories."

With the unreliable and inaccurate diagnostic tools available today,
increased early identification screening of children for mental
disorders proposed in HR2646 would almost certainly exacerbate already
out-of-control misdiagnosis and over-medication of children in our
country. This is a decidedly American problem, with the rate of
diagnosis of ADHD among children twenty times higher than in other
developed countries. Geographic disparities in diagnosis rates are attributable to
subjective, unscientific diagnostic tools. In the U.S., according to
the CDC, children in Florida are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed
with and medicated for ADHD than children in California, Nevada or
Colorado.

Nowhere does the disturbing trend of misdiagnosis and wrongful medication
of children seem more manifest than in Mr. Gionfriddo's own family story. In
the Washington Post, Mr. Gionfriddo wrote, "The school’s evaluations
suggested [my son Tim] had what was then called attention deficit
disorder... And it turned out that Tim probably didn’t really have
attention deficit disorder." Nonetheless, Mr. Gionfriddo also wrote in his book, "The pediatric
neurologist started Tim on Ritalin... It turned out that neither Tim's
teacher nor we could see any difference in his behavior, attention, or
focus when he was on Ritalin. The reason, as we would discover later,
was that ADHD wasn't really his problem."

In what has now become an all-too-familiar and sad refrain involving people
put on perhaps unnecessary, the wrong or harmful psychotropic
medications, Mr. Gionfroddo reported, "On Wednesday, November 20, 1996,
my son Tim brought a gun to school." Like Mr. Gionfriddo's son who was put on the ADHD drug Ritalin,
attorney Myron May was on the ADHD drug Vyvanse when he brought a gun to his alma mater and began shooting FSU students on November 20, 2014.

While fortunately neither Mr. Gionfriddo's son or other students at his
school were harmed during that particular firearm at school incident,
after starting on methylphenidate, Tim was later reportedly arrested in
a meth lab bust. Like methamphetamine, methylphenidate (Ritalin) is also a Schedule
II controlled substance. Methylphenidate carries an FDA-mandated Black
Box warning - the strongest possible - for drug dependence.

Equally disturbing, years after Ritalin was approved and Mr.
Gionfriddo's son was placed on the drug, the FDA released a
post-marketing review, in 2006, of adverse event reports to the agency,
warning that the data demonstrated children with no risk indicators, on
regular doses of any of the stimulants approved for ADHD, experienced
hallucinations, psychosis and mania. According to minutes of the March 22, 2006 FDA Pediatric Advisory
Committee meeting, Dr. Andrew Mosholder of the FDA's Division of Drug
Risk Evaluation noted that "symptoms of psychosis or mania were
estimated to occur [on ADHD stimulants] at a rate of 2 to 5 per hundred
person-years... This rate (greater than 1%) cannot be considered
rare..." Like other children seemingly misdiagnosed with ADHD and put on
psychosis-inducing stimulants, Mr. Gionfriddo's son would eventually be
diagnosed with schizophrenia, a condition often involving
hallucinations and psychosis.

It's time for America to step off the misdiagnosis and over-medication
roller-coaster. Due to the profit motive of some and despite the good
intentions of others, early mis-indentification of mental illness and
wrongful interventions are worsening, not solving the problem. During a mental health forum sponsored by Rep. Gus Bilirakis on December 16, 2014
in Land O' Lakes, FL, the bill's author Rep. Murphy stated, "Forty percent
of the time a person with psychiatric problem [sic] is on the wrong
types or level of medication."

HR2646 is old wine (HR3717) in a new bottle. It's bad for America, and
it's bad for our kids. Parents are intelligent enough to make the right
mental health decisions and seek the right mental health care if needed
for their children. They do not need more intrusive, wildly inaccurate
and unscientific diagnostic screening thrust upon them or their children.

Our nation's over-reliance on pharmacological answers to life's
challenges is manifestly not working for our veterans and military
personnel, either. The Army's report on the 2 April 2014 Fort Hood
shootings concluded that the mental health care Spc Ivan Lopez received
did not deviate from the standard of care. Time to rethink the standard
of care, which included in Lopez's case an untested polypharmacy cocktail of the psychotropic medications Celexa, Wellbutrin, Ambien and
Lunesta. Our service
personnel and veterans deserve better than being treated as guinea pigs,
experimented upon with risky, ineffective psychotropic polypharmacy.

On
the topic of Evidence-Based Treatment (EBT), can we agree that four dead
and twelve others shot is not evidence of a good outcome of medication
management? It should be noted that Army records indicate that Spc
Lopez attended at least ten counseling sessions dutifully over ten
months prior to the shooting; met with a social worker therapist, four
psychiatrists, and a nurse practitioner; sought multiple medication
refills voluntarily on a walk-in basis (Jan 14, 2014; March 6, 2014;
March 10, 2014), had psychotropic medications in his blood stream at the
time of death per his autopsy, and had even scheduled a follow up mental
health appointment prior to his death during a walk-in visit seeking medication.

The problem is not a lack of access to mental health care, a lack of
access to medications, anosognosia, medication non-compliance or
treatment non-compliance. The nature of the problem is American
psychiatry's fascination with an as yet unproven chemical imbalance
theory whereby mental illness is genetically hardwired into
individuals. Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman's exuberant hearing testimony
espousing the benefits of psychotropic medications, suggesting they can
prevent or eliminate mental illness, should be tempered by his comments
that his faith in pharmacologic manipulations is rooted in his first LSD trip. Patrick Kennedy's impassioned testimony eschewing any moral
component of mental illness ignores man's soul, argues fatalistically
that we're all just chemical soup, and removes the element of free
will. It's no wonder depression can turn into despair, when
psychiatrists tell patients fate has dealt them a hopeless genetic hand.

Harvey Rosenthal testified in the hearing that people need to be offered
a promise of hope and recovery, and that Assisted Outpatient Treatment
(AOT) is synonymous with medication. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the push to erode the privacy rights of patients. Undermining
confidentiality, so long a foundational tenet of mental health care, is
a chilling indicator that the page is indeed being turned, some would say
forcibly, away from proven yet more time-consuming psychotherapeutic and
recovery modalities, in favor of quick but ineffective medication
management. In light of Rep. Murphy's stunning admission that doctors
are wrong about psychiatric medications forty percent of the time, we're
now going to take away patient privacy in the name of medication
compliance? To comply with the wrong medications? So that caregivers - often parents who previously forced their
children to take the wrong medications under poor
medical advice - can continue to harm their kids well into adulthood?

Let parents parent their minor children without intrusion. Let adults
make mental health care decisions for themselves. We need less, not more,
government intrusion into mental health care.

In his determination to erode privacy rights as well as the centuries-old legal protection against false imprisonment afforded by habeas corpus - based upon shaky psychiatric
diagnoses and worrisome doctor prescribing habits - Rep. Tim Murphy claims with
great dramatic effect that the mentally ill are dying with their rights
on.

Actually, they're dying with psychotropic medications in their corpses, and often taking others with them. Spc Ivan Lopez died with
antidepressants and sedatives in his body, and took three others with
him. Elliot Rodgers died with Xanax (alprazolam) in his body, and took six others
with him.
Myron May died with Vyvanse in his veins, almost taking six others
with him. Andreas Lubitz,
Germanwings co-pilot, took 149 other souls with him when, according to
the BEA's preliminary report, he committed suicide by intentionally
crashing a plane into the Alps, after being prescribed antidepressants.

In the U.S., antidepressants carry an FDA-mandated Black Box warning for
increased risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. Again, on the topic
of EBT, can we agree that 150 lost souls is not evidence of a positive
outcome of antidepressants? Can we agree that the aforementioned deadly
mass shootings are not evidence of positive outcomes of psychotropic
medications?

Ironically, as the HR2646 hearing was closing, testimony of Aurora theater shooter James
Holmes' psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Fenton was just getting underway in
Colorado. She testified that Holmes was on a psychotropic cocktail of
150 mg of Sertraline (Zoloft), .5 mg of Klonopin (Clonazepam), and 10 mg
of Propanolol. DA: "Did he ever tell you that he wanted to stop
Sertraline?" Dr. Fenton: "No."

The assertion that medication non-compliance is the reason people with a
mental illness become violent is simply not true. Medications are not
the panacea that Rep. Murphy portrays them to be, and in fact there is
credible scientific evidence to suggest that they may be doing more harm than good.

Perhaps Murphy's bill would be more aptly named the Helping Big Pharma and Mental Health Industry Act.

Ms. Pera writes,
"Never considered by the editors or the writer, Ryan D’Agostino:
the story’s compounding of stigma already suffered by millions of
children, teens, and adults with ADHD and the people who love them."
To make her point, Ms. Pera then proceeds to ridicule a person with ADHD,
writing, "Only one man, Esquire reports, bravely says, 'Stop
drugging our boys!' He learned about ADHD not by studying it (that’s
obviously the girly way) but by having it himself." Ms. Pera
sticks up for stigmatized people diagnosed with ADHD everywhere by
making fun of someone with ADHD, joining the irrational ranks of
death penalty proponents who advocate killing people to show people
that killing people is wrong. Irony abounds in Ms. Pera's piece, as
she then goes on to accuse Esquire and Mr. D'Agostino of siding with
“deniers of ADHD – the anti-vaxxers of psychiatry” while citing
10,000 unnamed studies that she claims substantiate ADHD as a valid
diagnosis, yet have inexplicably failed to prove chemical imbalance
theory despite massive Big Pharma underwriting, much to the
disappointment of ADHD-hockers – the snake oil salespeople of
modern pseudo-science.

Ms. Pera, whose
livelihood presently depends on you believing that ADHD is real, is
intellectually dishonest when she characterizes Mr. D'Agostino's
exhaustive effort, sarcastically or not, as relying solely on the
word of one ostensibly uneducated man with ADHD. It is not entirely
clear to this reader whether Ms. Pera was deriding Howard Glasser in
her piece, who Mr. D'Agostino reports as having ADHD-like symptoms
during childhood but never definitively says was diagnosed with the
condition, or Dr. Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist also cited in Mr.
D'Agostino's article, who was reportedly diagnosed with ADHD. If she
was referring to Mr. Glasser, then Ms. Pera, a self-styled expert on
ADHD with no alphabet soup after her name, has armchair diagnosed Mr.
Glasser with ADHD, as proponents of the condition often do, and has
also omitted that Mr. Glasser has a bachelor's degree in psychology
and a master's in counseling. If Ms. Pera was referring to Dr.
Hallowell, then she is just plain confused. Moreover, whereas Mr.
D'Agostino cites multiple studies, psychologists and a psychiatrist
by name in his article, Ms. Pera cites no study, no psychologist, and
no psychiatrist by name. To her credit, though, she does cite one fellow
blogger by name.

In defense of ADHD
drugs, Ms. Pera writes, "With careful trial and error over time,
the medications can be adjusted to maximize positive effect and
minimize negative effect." Perhaps Ms. Pera should tell that to
the relatives of the 531 who have reportedly died, or to the 691 who
had life-threatening emergencies, or the 3,737 who were hospitalized
on ADHD medications (Source: Food and Drug Administration Adverse
Event Reporting System Q1 2004 – Q3 2012). Trial and error is what
one does with lab rats and guinea pigs, not children. Unfortunately,
since the passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in
1992, Big Pharma has been allowed to fast-track FDA approval of drugs
without adequate clinical trials upon payment of a bribe – scratch
that – fee to the FDA. Post-marketing surveillance, when unproven
and potentially dangerous drugs are unleashed on the unsuspecting
public, has become the new clinical trial, with the FDA leveraging
the AERS to manage the clinical trial on a national scale with our
children as test subjects, issuing drug warnings only after children
needlessly suffer and even die. For instance, after reviewing AERS
data in 2006 – long after the drugs had been approved for use on
the general population – the FDA's Division of Drug Risk Evaluation
(DDRE) issued a report recommending changes in ADHD drug prescribing
information to include warnings about psychosis, mania,
hallucinations, aggression, and violent behavior; and recommended
further evaluation regarding suicidality.

The FDA wrote in
its post-marketing review, “The most important finding of this
current review is that signs and symptoms of psychosis or mania,
particularly hallucinations, can occur in some patients with no
identifiable risk factors at usual doses of any of the drugs
currently used to treat ADHD. The predominance in young children of
hallucinations, both visual and tactile, involving insects, snakes
and worms is striking...”

While Lilly's drug Strattera already
contains a black-box warning – the strongest possible –
regarding suicidality, other ADHD drugs carry no warnings about
suicidal ideation, despite at least 707 completed suicides, 731
suicide attempts and 1,567 occurrences of suicidal ideation reported
to the FDA involving those medications (Note: Strattera reports not included in count). Presumably, the FDA is still conducting a post-marketing review of
the suicidiality risk of the other ADHD drugs, some eight years after
their initial post-marketing recommendation for further evaluation.
Tick tock goes the clock.

In addition to the
overwhelming empirical data casting doubt on the safety of ADHD
drugs, there has been a steady stream of anecdotal media reports of
children with no prior history harming others while reportedly on
ADHD medications, which are known to increase the likelihood of
aggression and violent behavior. Meanwhile, the media have been
bereft of any serious inclination to investigate what the
public-at-large has already figured out on its own. If a junior high
school gymnasium roof collapsed killing hundreds of kids at once, the media
would be camped outside with satellite trucks for weeks covering the
story. Instead, our nation's drugged youth are dying in the hundreds one by one in
silence: drip drop, drip drop.

While Ms. Pera
recommends trial and error with medications over time, time does not
favor ADHD medication efficacy, as supported by the authoritative
three-year and eight-year follow ups to the fourteen-month Multimodal
Treatment Study of Children With ADHD (MTA). Ms. Pera would have
people run the risk of serious adverse effects without any
demonstrable long-term benefit versus not taking medication. The
eight-year follow up to the MTA further revealed that those
continuing to take medication over time had to take on average a
roughly forty-five percent higher daily dose than at fourteen months
to achieve an equivalent level of functioning to those not taking
medication. Yes, you read correctly, over time you will need to take
more medication to have the same effect as not taking medication.

It is important to
note that the above referenced adverse reports do not even include
anti-psychotics such as Seroquel, Risperdal and Abilify which are
increasingly prescribed off-label for ADHD at an alarming rate, and
carry with them equally troubling side effects and warnings. Ms.
Pera, along with other ADHD diagnosis and drug proponents, may seek
to attack the data cited herein, but at least this writer is offering
data, rather than mere platitudes. The reader is encouraged to
consider how the aforementioned may attempt to distort the data,
excluding preexisting conditions and concomitant drug use, which has
the effect of understating the risks of ADHD medications and ignores
the realities of everyday life and poly-pharmacy in America. Drug
advocates will downplay the role of ADHD medication, for example, if
an autopsy uncovers a congenital heart defect, even though the
patient did not expire from the preexisting condition prior to taking
a stimulant drug bearing a warning of higher risk of serious
cardiovascular adverse events, and notwithstanding the fact that
people with congenital heart defects can live a long life without
ever experiencing any symptoms or requiring treatment. Likewise, if
a patient taking stimulants is also prescribed a Benzodiazepine in
order to counteract the known side effect of insomnia associated with
ADHD drugs, and/or is prescribed an anti-psychotic to negate the
known side effect of psychosis related to ADHD drugs, and then ends up
committing suicide, the respective drug manufacturers will point the
finger at one another while the FDA quietly applies an algorithm to
minimize the weight of the drug-induced death in their risk
calculations.

Perhaps the most
outlandish rebuttal that Ms. Pera offers to Mr. D'Agostino's article
highlighting the very real over-diagnosis and over-medication of American
boys is when she writes, "In children and teens, males are
diagnosed at greater rates than females. But by adulthood, the
number is more even." First, and most obviously, Mr.
D'Agostino's article is entitled “The Drugging of the American
Boy,” not “The Drugging of American Men.” As such, statistics
relating to women with so-called Adult ADHD, undoubtedly a target
demographic for growth-hungry pharmaceutical companies, are
irrelevant to Mr. D'Agostino's topic. Besides, even if the adult
diagnosis ratio is 1:1 for men and women, that means there are still
six times more males diagnosed with ADHD than females in their
lifetime. Women would have to be diagnosed at a rate of 6 to 1 in
adulthood to catch up to men, making the over-diagnosis of boys with
ADHD obvious to anyone with basic math skills and an open mind. For
Ms. Pera's argument to have any validity whatsoever, girls would have
to be going undiagnosed with ADHD 6 to 1 over boys in childhood, or
perhaps even more since some chemical imbalance flat-earthers would
still illogically argue that many boys are going undiagnosed to this
day. If such were the case, it would seriously invalidate the
already questionable diagnostic tests (e.g. Conners Behavior Rating
Scale, Vanderbilt Assessment Scale, Achenbach Child Behavior
Checklist, etc.) long touted by the Psycho-Pharma industry as being
scientific, but recognized by most as nothing more than subjective
checklists blissfully unencumbered by etiology. Of course, the idea
pushed by Ms. Pera and her ilk that ADHD is still under-diagnosed
strains credulity, in light of Dr. Stephen Hinshaw and Dr. Richard
Scheffler's recent contributions. How anyone could say with a
straight face that a sizeable percentage of school children in
America today continue to go undiagnosed is beyond comprehension.

Lastly, Ms. Pera
leaves us with the parting reassurance that, despite the lack of
evidence of long term benefits of ADHD medications and in spite of compelling evidence of the serious health risks they pose, many
automobile accidents and sports injuries have been avoided thanks to
ADHD medications. Ms. Pera's claims bear an eerily striking
resemblance intellectually to the oft-trumpeted justification of the
erosion of our civil rights in order to protect us from external
threats. Like the hawks who justify eavesdropping because of
countless, albeit undisclosed, terror plots thwarted; Ms. Pera would
tell us how many accidental deaths have been averted by ADHD
medications if she could, but she cannot.